Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome to these Surely you can't be
serious podcasts. I am with my good friend d D.
Speaker 2: How you doing to I man, I'm doing great. Glad
to be wrapping up season one. It has been a
heck of a year.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: I'm so proud of what we've done and proud of
what we've built and looking forward to season two.
Speaker 2: Yeah, overwhelmed by the amount of support that we've gotten
from all of our listeners. Can't be more excited about
what season two is going to hold, and want to
remind everybody to of course subscribe, give us a five
star rating if you can. But most importantly, our new
feature is on Patreon. If you would like to join
our Patreon group, we have several tiers and for this time,
if you join now, you get prizes. When you join,
you can become one of our executive producers. You can
win headphones, you can get a coffee mug that's personalized
and engraved and say in what we're talking about in
our next season. There's all kinds of good stuff that
comes along with the Patreon membership. So go to patreon
dot com, Forward slash Shirly Podcast and pick a teer
to help us out.
Speaker 1: That's right. We're not asking for a bunch of free
money here. We're giving away good quality stuff, right. And
just to clarify, this is not the last episode of
season one.
Speaker 2: No, this is kind of a special edition for tonight,
and we will be back with a matchup between Prince
Sign of the Times and Joshua Tree by YouTube.
Speaker 1: Two masterpieces of nineteen eighty seven. We're gonna dive in,
break them down, analyze it, give our opinions, and see
where we come down on those two big time albums.
Speaker 2: So for today's episode, Jason, when you were growing up,
did you ever listen to Paul Harvey on the radio?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2: I think he may possibly be my favorite voice announcer
on the radio ever. He would do the news.
Speaker 3: And did you ever listen to the rest of the story,
Oh yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: Paul Harvey is from my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Speaker 2: I've got a little homage for today's episode. It's going
to be a shorter episode.
Speaker 3: Let's hear it all right, here we go. It was
nineteen fifty one. Shelby stood anxiously at the Warner Brothers
recording studio, not sure about what was going to happen next.
He had only recently moved to California in hopes of
making it big, and so far he hadn't had a
whole lot of success.
Speaker 2: He was far from home on his second marriage and
had a young boy he had grown to a door
depending on him, But little did he know the profound
impact that this upcoming recording session would have. A one
hundred years ago, the population of Eric, Oklahoma was nine
hundred and seventy one, which is about thirty eight more
than its population is today, and in April of nineteen
twenty one, that population increased by one when Bill and
Aura welcomed their third son in the world. Shelby would
go on to learn horse riding and fiddle playing from
Bill and so from a young age he would ride
in rodeos, and at fifteen he formed a band called
the plain View Melody Boys, who would periodically play on
Station KASA in Elk City, Oklahoma. When Shelby was only nineteen,
he married his first wife, Melva Miller, herself only seventeen
at the time. Shelby became close with Melva's young cousin Roger,
taught him how to play the guitar and bought him
his first fiddle. Roger Miller would grow up to become
a successful country musician himself. You probably know his song
King of the Road, which was a number one Hot
Country single and reached number four on the Hot one hundred.
But This Seed that Shall Be Planted would not be
the biggest mark he would make on the world of entertainment.
Though he tried to enlist for World War Two, his
rodeo injuries kept him out of the military, so instead
he worked as a welder for oil drillers. Then in
nineteen forty six, at the encouragement of Ernest tub he
decided to leave the oil field, leave Oklahoma and pursue
his love of music. He recorded his first single, moved
to Fort Worth, Texas, and for three years he toured
the South, but was ultimately unable to hit it big.
So in nineteen fifty he brought his second wife, Edna
and her young son Gary to Hollywood in hopes of
establishing himself as an actor or a singer. But after
a year he had only had a handful of parts,
mostly uncredited, and that included the movie he was about
to record for Uncredited For the part he played in
the movie and uncredited for his part in the audio
track that he was about to record. Yes, uncredited for
the part that would become one of the most iconic
recordings in history. Now, as it turned out, Shelby would
ultimately be a success as a singer and as an actor.
Just a year later, in nineteen fifty two, he would
land his first big role in the movie High Noon
as Ben Miller, one of the gang who would face
off against Gary Cooper. A year after that, two songs
that he had written would become hits for Teresa Brewer
and Hank snow. Then, in nineteen fifty eight, he had
two career making events. First, he was cast as Peter
Nolan in the series Rawhide, a role he would play
for the next eight years. Second was that he had
recorded a song that would be his biggest chart topper,
going gold in just three weeks and hitting number one
on the Hot one hundred.
Speaker 3: The song it.
Speaker 2: Was a one eyed, one horn flying Purple People Leader Horn.
Speaker 3: It has sold well over one hundred million copies to date.
But I am saying today that his uncredited contribution to
one of his earliest movies surpasses even this in its impact.
On the entertainment world. His acting career didn't stop with
raw Hide either. He was in more than sixty movies
and television roles, including The War Wagon with John Wayne,
The Outlaw, Josie Wales with Clint Eastwood, Silverado with Kevin Kleine,
Kevinner and Danny Glover, and Hoosiers, where he was literally
sitting next to Gene Hackman on the bench helping coach
the team. He was also one of the original cast
members of Hehaw, which he wrote the theme for. He
also had quite a bit of success as a recording
artist as well. He had several more gold records. He
won a CMA in nineteen sixty eight Songwriter of the
Year in nineteen ninety two. He also won the Western
Heritage Award for nine years in a row for his
television work. But I maintain it was his nineteen fifty
one recording that will be his most lasting legacy, and
most people don't even know he was the man responsible.
So what was Shelby Woolley who went by sheb about
to record on that faithful day? Well, it was just
one of a handful of actors they had called back
that day to do some recording. They needed to finish
up the movie Distant Drums. Sheb did six different takes
and the last three ended up in the movie. Then
all six takes went into the Warner Brothers vault, only
to be used again in nineteen fifty two and in
nineteen fifty three, three times in nineteen fifty four, including
the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born, twice
in fifty five, and again and again over and over
for the next twenty years. But nobody noticed. Nobody except
a young film production grad student at USC named Ben.
In his studies, Ben had noticed Sheb's work and was impressed,
so impressed that he and his buddy Richard would record
it from A Star Is Born just to put it
in their nineteen seventy four student film, The Scarlet Blade.
Ben would graduate the next year, and then two years
after that he would get his first credited job as
a sound designer. This job allowed him to do research
in several sound libraries, including the one at Warner Brothers,
where he was able to find Seb's original recordings, and
it was this discovery that led to its proliferation in
the nineteen eighties, nineties and on into the twenty first century.
His friend Richard used it in his movies as well,
including Poltergeist, Batman Returns, Planet of the Apes, and Madagascar.
Other sound editors became aware of Seb's recordings and used
it in their films as well. Disney films, Spielberg films,
Joe Dante has used it in at least five of
his films. Peter Jackson was so impressed that he deliberately
cranked the volume when Sheb's voice was used in Lord
of the Rings, and when Quentin Tarantino learned the significance
of this recording while it was being put into Reservoir Dogs,
he called a break and had his sound crew come
and listen to its first appearance way back in Distant Drums.
In fact, since ben discovered Seb's recordings back in nineteen
seventy seven while finding sounds for a new movie called
Star Wars, Sheb's voice has been used in over one
hundred and thirty films and television episodes, and Ben Bert
found it in a canister marked quote man getting bit
by an alligator and he screams end quote because it
wasn't Sheb's singing voice, but his screaming voice that he
recorded on that faithful day back in nineteen fifty one,
and though Sheb played Private Jessup in Distant Drums, it
was a memorable moment in a film two years later
called The Charge at Feather River, where Ben Burt first
heard Sheb's scream as another young private is shot in
the leg a young private named Willhelm, which is why,
if you haven't guessed it already, he named it the
Wilhelm Scream, and that is the story as best I
can tell.
Speaker 1: Nice. That's awesome.
Speaker 3: That's awesome.
Speaker 1: I know it from Star Wars for sure, Return of
the Jedi.
Speaker 3: For sure, Indiana Jones, Indiana.
Speaker 1: Raiders, a little lost star without a doubt.
Speaker 3: It's iconic.
Speaker 1: That's good man, you did some research on that.
Speaker 3: That's awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was just crazy when you find out that
the guy responsible for the one eyed, one horn, flying
Purple People Leader and the themed Hehaw is the guy
who did the Wilhelm screen.
Speaker 1: That's incredible. It's incredible. I'm gonna have to go back
and watch Whosis just to figure this guy out. So
all right, everybody, thank you for joining us on this
mini episode coming soon.
Speaker 3: De This is going to be amazing.
Speaker 1: We are going to break down and analyze Princess Sign
of the Times album versus You Two's Joshua Tree. And
then after that, around Christmas time, we're going to discuss
and debate Leave the Weapon versus Diehard.
Speaker 3: Christmas movies, absolutely Christmas.
Speaker 1: Movies, just in time for the holidays, all.
Speaker 2: Right, everybody, so be sure and join us for that.
We can't wait look forward to seeing you of them.
Speaker 1: Ah. We ought to do our uh impressions, oh man,